Scammers, as a category, target everyone. You think Indians don't get conned into sharing their OTP/passwords or financial details?
> They are too short-sighted to not see that the "industry" is damaging India's global reputation
India has one of the lowest police officers to population ratios in the world. They are so swamped with day-to-day crimes and other nonsense and providing protection to events and politicians that India's "global reputation" is simply not on their radar.
You cannot buy a SIM for your phone or open a bank account without providing ten types of identity documents but these scammers seem to have an infinite supply of phone numbers and bank accounts. That is just the way things are.
Right, but it's a lens thing. US merchants don't care that they're also targeting non-Americans. They care about "target US people" as a subset of that.
Case in point: my US bank insists on sending an OTP to my US number (and US number alone) for any transaction, making it impossible for me to move money when abroad. The problem exists in the other direction too, my foreign account only allows verification thru one mechanism. It's really frustrating.
Unfair or not, it actually makes a difference. I was in a neat position to see some of the attempts in real time. It blew me away how much attempted fraud there is. Think of it like spam email - it's that bad.
But there were on the order of 50x more attempts from bots trying to log into our Wordpress instance from India (all illegitimate) than from actual customers. It was ridiculous.
Of course it matters and of course they are.
Everything you describe and OP describes are frictions that apply by virtue of you not being in the US, on purpose.
Strictly speaking it doesn't make it impossible. You have made a choice not to pay roaming fees while using your USA number while abroad.
Nowadays many scammers switch to digital concurrency like Bitcoin, which is even less traceable and hard to shut down, but that's only because banks and stores have put in the counter-measurements you encounter to combat them.
There are many scamming related materials available online. Many scam-baiters put their video on Youtube, such as Jim Browning [1] and Kitboga [2].
You need to update your information and knowledge
India doesn't put heavy hammer on scammers for various reasons. For example, since the scammers are mostly targeting foreign countries, and Indian police are well known for accepting bribes from these scammers, the scamming business is de-facto welcomed. They are too short-sighted to not see that the "industry" is damaging India's global reputation, which transitively affects you in negative way. It's unfortunate, and hope the situation improves over the time.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/02/...